Some believe that The Sound and the Fury is Faulkner’s greatest novel. I will not argue this because it seems like an exercise in futility trying to decide which among equals is the greatest. They are great in different ways. No single work could possibly contain an imagination as diverse and generative as Faulkner’s. What is important here is that The Sound and the Fury is his first great fiction and that nothing which came before it even approximates its imaginative power and technical virtuosity, nor gives any indication (really) that such an incredible act of the imagination and language might be forthcoming. Like Faulkner’s own genius, this novel seems to have grown slowly, silently from within, and then just suddenly manifested itself. As is true of most of Faulkner’s great novels, its genesis is essentially a mystery. It remains, today, an incredible work, as rich and resonant as ever, its power still growing as different readings make more of it accessible to us. Like all of Faulkner’s great fictions, The Sound and the Fury never dates itself, never lapses into purely historical, regional, or national brackets—though it is deeply grounded in all three. Not only was it his first great novel but The Sound and the Fury seemed to be Faulkner’s favorite from among his own works. Like first, intense love, it had a special place in his imagination. His feelings toward it also remind one of a parent’s relationship to a first child, or perhaps to a favorite child: one looks for things in the novel or about the novel which would account for the particular affection Faulkner always felt toward it.
I would like to pursue these “facts” about The Sound and the Fury for a bit by asking what this first great novel tells us about Faulkner near the beginning of his astounding career (think of the nine fictions that followed in the next twelve years,) by asking what the sources of its intrinsic power as a fiction and a novel are, and by asking why, from among so many choices, this first great fiction remained Faulkner’s favorite and so has a kind of special significance in the life of his imagination. I want to use these three questions as a means of access to the inwardness of Faulkner’s early genius (as distinct, say, from his mature genius, as we see it in such a work as Absalom, Absalom! which Faulkner always thought of as his “big” novel; and his late genius, as we see it in A Fable, which Faulkner thought of as his final or culminating novel).
Working, initially, off the surfaces of The Sound and the Fury, the most obvious and important things about it are (1) its stylistic virtuosity and variety; (2) its structural complexity and coherence; (3) its obsession with point of view; (4) its concern with the family; (5) its concern with loss and suffering; and (6) its awareness (for want of a better term) of black and white as human realities. Put in other terms, the work is characterized by (1) an amazing, a dazzling verbal talent at work; (2) an equally amazing, sometimes bewildering, but finally never confusing structuring talent which is capable of ordering an amazing variety of surface detail in such a way as to achieve a deep inner coherence; (3) a view of reality centered in character, subjectivity, individual points of view, and the radical disparity between outer and inner realities; and (4) a view of society centered upon or around the family and, within the family, upon history (the force of the past) and race (black and white realities). These concerns persisted right through to the end of Faulkner’s career, though not always together in the same novel, and seldom in the same way in any given novel.
Reading Faulkner’s accounts (in Faulkner at the University and Faulkner at Nagano, for example) of his relationship to this novel, one becomes aware of how consistently he makes the same cluster of points. They all have to do with his particular affection for this novel and to the ways in which he perceives its relationship to his other novels. Faulkner often described his own career as a writer in terms of his repeated attempts (all partial failures, he says) to tell the perfect story in the perfect way. He says that most of his novels were attempts to achieve this double perfection, to come as close as possible to some idea and ideal he had in his head before and as he wrote. The place of the ideal is of extraordinary significance in Faulkner’s novels; it is probably of equal significance in his own conception of himself as novelist and in the way in which, finally, we can come to understand his enormously complex development. If The Sound and the Fury does nothing else, it tells us right near the beginning that we are encountering one of the most complex imaginations in American literature. Though we may want to argue with him, Faulkner says—repeatedly—that he may have tried the most and come closest to achieving this complexity in The Sound and the Fury. His affection for this novel is always cast into these terms: the degree of difficulty of what he tried and the extent to which he succeeded in achieving it. This is quite different from his avowed affection for Ratliff in The Hamlet-Town-Mansion trilogy; or from the profound identification with and affection for Ike McCaslin which we intuit in Go Down, Moses.
Faulkner was very specific about what he was trying to do in The Sound and the Fury. He says that he started with the image of Caddy with her dirty drawers when she was up in the tree at night, her brothers all down below, looking in the window at dead Dammudy. Among other things, this is an image of a child’s forbidden perception and experience of death and loss. It is also a very complex familial image because all of the children are there together, along with Versh, and the one girl, the sister, is up above them doing the looking, the experiencing, and she is looking in at both the dead and the adults, and the parents and grandparent. Faulkner says, without much elaboration, that in writing the novel he made repeated attempts to explain this image. We can understand it, then, as the matrix from which the novel was generated. The quality of this image, and the repeated but, Faulkner says, finally unsuccessful attempts to explain it are always central to his affection for it.
The expansion of an image into a long complex novel, or, conversely, a novel understood as an attempt to explain a complex image are both characteristic of Faulkner. The image of Caddy at the window, is, though static, interminable and unexplainable once you begin to search for its implications, relationships, and meanings. Once begun, the process can only be brought to an end when you have a sense that there is a sufficiency—not a finality. The last image of this novel—Benjy being taken the wrong way around the square by Luster—is not final: it does not end the novel, it summarizes one essential element of it: wrongness, loss, inarticulate suffering.
Faulkner always spoke of his novels as part of an ongoing compulsive process, as a series of attempts to get at, to achieve something that was always beyond him, or to release, to let out something that was inside his head, often talking to him or, as with the image of Caddy, asking to be explained. The Sound and the Fury was his favorite because it epitomized what it meant to him to be a novelist, perhaps because of his own sense of, and joy in, the creative greatness that was in him. The exhilaration of conceiving, writing, and finishing a work such as The Sound and the Fury early in one’s career must be so intense as to be nearly unbearable; it must be truly ecstatic, orgasmic. No wonder he had such a strong affection for this novel, even though it can hardly be described as a joyful work, and ends with one of the most anguishing images in all of Faulkner.
The points to keep in mind from this brief discussion of Faulkner’s affection for The Sound and the Fury are his own sense that his novels usually involved risk-taking (dangerous subjects, difficult technical problems, impossible ideals); his sense that each novel was related to the previous ones because each was yet another attempt to penetrate more deeply into one of the dangerous subjects, to perfect his craft as a novelist, to try out yet another ideal; and finally, that he always thought of his novels in terms of the degree to which they partially achieved some part of an ongoing, life-long ideal. Faulkner’s imagination took on enormously difficult tasks, and it took them on repeatedly. Like Melville, he had a most courageous and radical imagination. He “took on” such subjects as the relation of subjective points of view to each other and to an objective reality (perhaps even the question of whether there is such a thing); the relations of black to white in the south; blackness itself; the nature of the family as a generative and destructive social and ontological force; the hierarchy and power of language itself. I don’t aim to do an exhaustive list. I only want to render Faulkner’s own sense of what he was trying for in The Sound and the Fury, and the extent to which he valued the novel in relation to the nature of the endeavor and the degree to which it was radical, risky, and, for him, only a partial success. This is particularly important because The Sound and the Fury tries to tell the same basic story four times (five, if you include Faulkner’s return to it eighteen years later in the Appendix);